Are Kobo’s Audiobooks Too Overpriced?

Last week Kobo started selling audiobooks on their website alongside ebooks.

They also introduced an audiobook subscription plan that costs $9.99 per month in the US and $12.99 in Canada. Basically you get one audiobook per month with the current subscription, and they plan on adding more options in the future.

Kobo’s audiobooks can be purchased individually without a plan as well.

I was looking at the prices of some of them and I’m always surprised by how expensive audiobooks are.

Some audiobooks sell for over $50 and yet the ebook is only like $10. It makes no logical sense whatsoever.

No wonder Kobo and other audiobook companies have to resort to convoluted subscription plans or no one would buy audiobooks.

A quick glance at a number of random titles, it becomes quickly apparent that Kobo’s audiobooks are often priced higher than the same titles at Amazon/Audible. A few are cheaper at Kobo but most are cheaper through Audible.

At lot of Kobo’s prices are higher but Kobo has a price advantage over Audible when it comes to the subscription plan. Kobo’s is $10 per month and Audible’s is $15. Both grant 1 credit per month to exchange for any audiobook, but with Audible you get 2 free audiobooks to subscribe and with Kobo you get one.

It makes you wonder if Kobo’s plan is to offer a lower price on subscriptions than Audible but with higher prices on individual titles to make up for it. If that’s the case you’re better off shopping around for individual titles to get the lowest price because Kobo’s audiobooks often priced higher.

Kobo also has their Price Match Guarantee that extends to audiobooks so you could get lower prices from them in the form of a store credit.

If it doesn’t matter than why not have the same exact prices as Audible? Obviously some people buy audiobooks individually or the option wouldn’t exist. Currently you can only get one single audiobook per month from Kobo with their subscription. I’m sure there are plenty of people that want more than that, especially when you can get through an audiobook in just a few days. It’s not like Audible where you can just buy more credits when you run out. One per month is all you can get, at least for now.

I can understand them being a little more expensive, but $50 for an audiobook at 4 or 5x the price of the ebook is just crazy. You can buy a DVD for like $20 that takes dozens, sometimes hundreds of people to create. There’s no reason audiobooks should cost that much. You can buy an entire season of Game of Thrones for half the price of a single GOT audiobook. It just goes to show how excessively greedy big publishers are in this day and age.

Over the course of the past three years the highest growing segment of publishing are audiobooks. The global audiobook industry is currently evaluated at $3.5 billion dollars and the United States is currently the largest singular market with $1.8 billion dollars in audio sales in 2016 and this was a 31% increase from 2015. The Audio Publishers of America has stated that every year for the past three years 36,000 audiobooks were issued. When it comes right down to it, the retailers are the ones who benefit from the audiobook revolution. The vast majority of the companies that spoke to Good e-Reader have disclosed that they have seen triple digit growth and expect this trend to continue into 2017.

For one thing, Amazon sells devices that audiobooks can be played on; Kobo doesn’t. Amazon is *probably* subsidizing … at least a little … their cost and it certainly gives Amazon more incentive to sell them than Kobo has.

In addition to production costs, you have storage and bandwidth costs. Just look at prices to purchase movies on Vudu or Amazon Prime. The cost of a digital copy of the movie is as much or nearly as much as buying the physical media (DVD or Blu-Ray), sometimes more if you can pick up the physical media at Wal*Mart in their discount movies bins.

I signed up yesterday and am living my first audio book. UK price £6.99 per month is competitive but when I’ve finished this book I’m going to be frustrated waiting for the monthly allowance. There is no way I would pay the prices they quote.
It does worry me the apparently limited choice of audiobooks at present.